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Which CPU Is Tops in Price/Performance?
mikemuch writes "You can spend 150 bucks or over a thousand on a processor, but how do you know which gives you the most power for your money? It's a little like MPG for CPUs. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case does extensive benchmarking on twenty-three current desktop processor flavors from AMD and Intel. While of course most folks won't make dollar-efficiency the sole basis for their chip decisions, it's interesting to see which CPUs get you, for example, the most frames per second in Far Cry for a dollar." From the article: "Take PC games, for example. The cheapest CPU available may have the best frame rate per dollar ratio. But you still need an adequate frame rate for an optimum gaming experience, and the cheapest CPU may not deliver that. On the other hand, office applications are generally not as sensitive to raw performance, and the lower cost processor may be better. It's all in what you do."
Almost all power consumed by processor get converted to heat any idea about Power consumed vs work done?
Not exactly surprising, but I wonder how much of that is tied to the OS (f'rinstance, dual core kicks ass on OS X for processor-intensive tasks). Similarly, I wonder how much of it is simply benchmarking the wrong kinds of things. Comparing "office productivity" is mostly useless, as they say in the article, yet it still gets benched. Similarly, graphics, while still relying on the CPU, uses the GPU more and more.
I've found in my own little "tests" that heavy-duty rendering and long-term CPU processes are really where the benchmark tests are at. Fire up something like VirtualDub and compare the time it takes to transcode video files, for instance, or use ffmpegX on Mac OS X. That's where the real CPU tests come into play. Not office and games.
(I'd also be curious to see what happens if you start switching around operating systems. Test to see if an AMD chip and NVIDIA board is better running a Linux flavor compared to Intel, for instance).
I had thought it a strange summary actually , After reading through the article the Athalon 64 3000+ was a clear winner by a large margin .. unless I misread some of the results .The only things the AMD chips did badly on were artificial tests.
They didn't even mention the chip in the summary and it pulverised every other chip
Defiantly a great buy for your money .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I haven't been deep in numbers for processor performance over the last couple of years. I've found the processing speed to be so fast lately that the software I use or care about runs FAST on most modern processors.
That said, when someone asks me for advice, unless they have some specific high-end gaming requirement, the only advice I offer is don't buy a Celeron!
Other than the poor performing Celeron I suspect most processing bottlenecks today are more from insufficient memory, bad or slow bus architectures, network latencies, and disk I/O bandwidth.
Frustrating to me is the non-sequitur naming of technology, I don't know if it's done intentionally to confuse the buying public. A friend of mine saw the ads for some manufacturer's laptop with Centrino technology (which really isn't about processor anyway), and went to her favorite electronics store and got talked into a laptop with the Celeron (mistakenly remembering the "C" word incorrectly).
I made her take it back and exchange for Centrino.
Given away by whom?
I recently got an old server from my office for free. It was dual capable, so I figured I'd stick another PII 450 in there for fun. What could it cost, like $10?
Called up Dell to make sure that it could handle the 450, and I was offered to buy it from them. Get ready for the price:
$457.
That doesn't include installation or anything. I literally laughed out loud and the guy on the other end said "Yeah, you should probably get it somewhere else."
I went to pricewatch and I got it for $12 with shipping. For that price, I could have bought a whole fleet of PII 450s...maybe that's not a bad idea...
The review calculates price/performance based on the price of the CPUs instead of total system cost. A useless measure, since a CPU on its own cannot do anything useful. It also hides the added system costs for CPUs that consume a lot of power: larger PSU, more cooling and noise reduction measures. And then there are the additional platform costs for CPUs that only work with particular chipsets or expensive motherboards. Never mind the increment to your electricity bill.
What this smells like is yet another bullshit metric invented by the Intel marketing department. One wonders how much these review sites get paid for prostituting themselves.
Both of these processors need $500 of ancillary equipment in order to function. Therefore, a system with processor A gives 100 units for $600, or 0.167 units/$, whereas processor B gives 150 units for $650, or 0.231 units/$. This analysis shows that processor B is better value when speccing out a new system
But what about the case where you're just upgrading your cpu? Well, in that case it's moot to compare the AMD with the Intel processors, as you would need a new motherboard too. But simply dividing the performance by the cost of the cpu is meaningless here, too, because staying with your existing processor ($0) would give you a performance/price ratio of infinity.
Conclusion: you have to calculate your total outlay in order to figure out which cpu is the better value.
Actually, there is a clear-cut leader: AMD
I noticed that too, but this makes me wonder how fair it was:
Memory
AMD: 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS 3200XL (CAS 2-2-2-5)
Intel: 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS2 Pro (CAS 3-3-3-8)
Now I am no expert in computer memory these days (I stopped paying attention when DDR hit), but shouldn't the difference in these impact the tests somewhat?
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
I haven't bought a new CPU for years. In the past I would look at the fastest CPU on the market, and then buy one that runs at about half the speed. It helps to also buy a motherboard that supports faster CPUs.
For example, I bought a new system back in 2000. I think the top of the range Intel chips then were P3s @ 700-800 MHz. I bought two P2-450s for my computer. A few years later I bought two P3-850s, which was the max the motherboard would take. For those four CPUs, I paid less than the price of a single P3-550 back when I was originally shopping around.
Buying top-of-the-range CPUs is just a waste of money. Gamers are the biggest fools of the bunch with their obsession to have the latest and greatest.
I work in a high performance computing center, and we just recently acquired a new cluster. One of the major items that we looked at was the amount of heat that is generated by the systems, as cooling systems for large amounts of equipment can be quite costly. We went with AMD dual core systems because we were able to load up with twice the number of systems and cores (thus a 4X overall improvement in number of processors) for a heat load that was actually less than the old system we had that was running Intel Xeon processors.
Shifting to a DC powergrid helped a lot too.
Intel uses DDR2 which is probably clocked at 667 MHZ as opposed to the 400MHZ of the AMD memory.
But DDR2 is a big pile of garbage, it was designed to be ultra cheap and junky but somehow the prices never actually came down all we got were a whole bunch of memory maker anti-trust cases while Intel was fed to the dogs.
AMD is looking at moving over to DDR2 now that it is hitting 800Mhz which might provide something like similar performance to DDR unfortunatly DDR3 is going to hit next year and it is actually supposed to provide a significant increase in performance.
I find the ultrasparc processors do much better than any late to the game 64 bit processors like AMD and Intel.
and price / performance? beats the hell out of the IA64 platform.
replying have said these metrics don't have a lot of value to them (in one way or another)
I disagree
But I'm a rendering geek
I was VERY happy to see the POVRAY price/performance (technically performance/price) breakdown... and will definitely be getting an Athlon 64 XP when I build my system... the 3000+ model if these numbers are still valid when I get the loot
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
There is an interesting article at pcworld ( http://pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122700,pg,3, 00.asp ). It states that both AMD and Intel have low cost 64 bit microprocessors out(AMD Sempron 2200+, Intel Celeron D.) The AMD Sempron cost only $60 so it is less than half the cheapest microprocessor reviewed here. I would like to see one of these reviewed using a 64 bit Linux operating system with only 64 bit programs.
When I buy a new CPU, I use a slightly different metric. Bang-for-buck is important to me, but so is raw performance. So I multiply the two together: (units of performance) * (units of performance per dollar) = (perf units ^ 2 / dollars). This tends to yield a maximum at a couple of speed grades below the highest available, which is the point at which the prices really start to take off.
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